Normally, composite materials are produced in that thin deformable material layers, such as for example woven materials, interlaid scrims, prepregs, papers, veneers, metal sheets, foils, nonwoven fabrics, and mats, or other sheet-like flexible material layers that in the context of the present invention are collectively referred to as a “material layer”, are removed from a flat surface, such as for example a table, and are placed one on top of the other in a mould tool that comprises a base surface that is curved in one or two directions. In these known production processes of composite materials, up to now the individual material layers have been manually picked up and placed in the mould tool. While there have been experiments to automate the placing of material layers in the mould tool, these experiments have, however, so far exclusively resulted in very expensive robot-gripper kinematics that are associated with very considerable technical implementation expenditure and enormous costs without returning anywhere near satisfactory results.
In the automation of the placement procedure of material layers in form tools with one-dimensional or two-dimensional curved surfaces, which in the context of the present invention are collectively referred to as relief moulds, there is a problem in that in the unrolled state the material layers to be placed are normally too big, and can therefore not at all or only unsatisfactorily be placed in a sheet-like manner in the tool mould, as shown in FIG. 1. Thus, such tool moulds for the production of layered materials as a rule comprise lateral delimitations, which results in a material layer that is to be placed into a mould not fitting in the tool mould in the stretched state of said material layer.
Furthermore, when placing material layers in a tool mould there is a further problem in that in order to produce particular geometric shapes of the composite to be produced, several material layers of different sizes are placed in a tool mould, for example in order to achieve material reinforcement in one position of the composite. However, this means that in known automation attempts, for example with the use of the above-mentioned robot-gripper kinematics, for each individual material layer a new matching gripper geometry is required so that no irregularities such as wrinkling or the like occur when the actual material layer is placed onto a material layer that has previously been placed in the tool mould.